Rebel AI Announces Product to Fight Methbot Ad Fraud

Rebel AI announced that it would launch Passport, an ad security product to fight programmatic media trading fraud and domain spoofing.

Manny Puentes, CEO, Rebel AI

The Boulder, Colorado- based technology start-up is focused on providing expertise and products to the digital advertising industry.

Rebel AI is founded in 2016 by Manny Puentes, an ad tech veteran who helped build one of the first real-time bidding engines in 2010. It has brought together a team of product and engineering executives to address some of the digital advertising industry’s most pressing problems.

“Advertisers have increasingly turned to private marketplaces, deal IDs, and whitelists as a way to hand-pick premium domains and protect them from fraud, but ad delivery can be spoofed. Securing delivery and digital identity will be a vital part of restoring confidence in programmatic advertising,” said Puentes.

Domain and device spoofing is threatening the ad space

A White Ops study revealed that a massive bot farm, known within its code as “Methbot,”is operating out of a sophisticated network of data centers. Unlike typical bots, these bots were spoofing more than 6,000 domains to look like vogue.com, espn.com, and other premium publisher domains that typically command $10+ CPMs for their video inventory. Rebel AI is developing a product dedicated to fighting Methbot-type ad delivery fraud that impersonates these domains.

Passport will eliminate programmatic ad fraud

Passport would eliminate ad fraud in programmatic trading between publishers and advertisers by leveraging asymmetric encryption, the blockchain, machine learning and two-way authentication. Passport also protects the integrity of the domain and device identity data, which is increasingly important as today’s buying algorithms rely on accurate data to determine value.

Passport works through any programmatic path. The ad can be delivered with a virtual direct connection in a secure way no matter how many SSP, DSP, or other jumps an ad might take. When the ad displays at the correct destination, a verifying signal is sent back to Passport to decrypt the ad.

Rebel AI simplifies the programmatic ecosystem

Digital advertising continues to experience year-over-year growth, but the industry is also growing more complex, with countless vendors and intermediaries that sit between publishers and advertisers. Rebel AI works to simplify the digital media trading ecosystem through strategic, streamlined technology products.